Iteration eight lost Depot Five by forty-one seconds.

The overlay held the miss in pale geometry. Strike Group Two had waited for confirmation from Strike Group One. The confirmation arrived after the fold window closed. Four went dark on Sarah’s clock. Five stayed lit, twenty-one hours of window spent on a courtesy.

Kira Vance let the failure sit. Naming it too early made the next run sloppy.

Hope’s bridge was empty except for her. Docked-ship quiet. Reactor in standby. The air ran five degrees cooler than Prometheus, the offset the hull kept even with the Cascade Reactor asleep. Soft blue from the tactical board painted the dark stations. The coffee on the rail had taken the temperature of the bulkhead.

Through the forward viewport Earth turned, blue-white, too close to be a destination. Beyond it, Prometheus’s construction frameworks held two charcoal fuselages in vacuum, cyan running lights tracing their lengths. Vanguard and Defiant waited in the yard. Hope was already under her boots.

Twelve junior officers had left Marcus’s lab yesterday with duffels and orders. None of them were in this room.

CLIO’s voice came from the nearest node, soft, the register she used when the ship was supposed to be resting.

“Iteration eight complete. Strike Group Two extraction delayed forty-one seconds past the fold window. Depot Five remains contested. Depot Four is clean. Simultaneous proof: failed.”

“I know.”

“Would you like the casualty projection for the delayed group?”

“No.”

She already had the shape of it. Stay forty-one seconds past the window and the pairing split. The Vethrak learned that. The alliance could not afford the lesson.

She reset the board.

Iteration nine. She tightened the fold-comm handshake. Both groups would transmit ready-state at T-minus four minutes and extract on a shared clock, no wait for acknowledgment. The clocks ran. Four emptied. Five emptied. The overlay went dark in the same breath.

Clean.

She did not trust clean.

“Flip the board,” she said. “Vethrak side. Same pairing. Give their garrison commanders the Kaath-Seven doctrine and nothing else. No new tricks. I want to know where the old ones still get lucky.”

CLIO rebuilt the field from the other chair. Predictable patrols. Fixed garrisons. No triage. Four still treated fuel, hull material, and cold stores as the same priority. Five still sat eleven hours offset, two escorts and a tender who had never been asked to cover a neighbor.

Kira ran it from the depot floor. She sent the escorts along the invariant route. She executed the process.

Iteration ten put an escort thirty seconds late on the lance window at Four. Depot shields held an extra beat. The extraction still cleared. The margin was uglier.

Iteration eleven put Five’s tender in the wrong parking slot, a garrison habit Vasquez had annotated. The second group adjusted. The clock held.

“Alliance side,” Kira said. “As written.”

Iteration twelve ran Sarah’s pairing. Eighty-hour patrol at Four. Eighty-four at Five. Eleven-hour offset. Complementary inventories. Reinforcement nineteen hours and twenty-one. Simultaneous fold. Separate battle spaces. No mutual support. Forty-three light-years from the nearest help that could change a clock.

The overlay went dark on both markers inside the window.

CLIO waited the length of a learned pause.

“Captain, the simulation is statistically clean. The margin of error at iteration twelve is within acceptable parameters.”

“Run it again.”

“Specify the variable.”

“I am not looking for the clean run.” Kira’s hands stayed on the board. Steady. The hands that had built firing solutions for three years and a campaign for three weeks. “I am looking for the one that breaks.”

The one Chen would find in an after-action review and read in the voice she used for facts that had already killed people. The model could hold a garrison. It could not hold a courtesy.

“Iteration thirteen,” CLIO said. “Randomized crew latency. Human decision lag at both command chairs, sampled from Kaath-Seven logs.”

The pairing survived. Ugly. Inside the window.

“Again.”

Iteration fourteen opened on the same geometry and died of a different manners problem.

Fold-comm between the two systems carried a delay the handshake protocol had treated as noise. Strike Group One transmitted ready. Strike Group Two received the ready forty-eight seconds late, held for the matching confirmation, and missed the shared clock. Four extracted. Five waited. The garrison clock at Five had already started.

Kira sat forward.

There it was.

Not a hull. Not a lance window. A sentence two groups said to each other across a gap the light could not close in time.

“CLIO. Log the failure. Comm-delay desynchronization on dual-group fold timing. Handshake protocol assumes the confirmation arrives inside the window. It does not.”

“Logged. Recommendation?”

She built the fix on the board while the failure still glowed. Independent extraction clocks. Pre-authorized. No handshake. Each group folded on its own mark, computed before departure, updated only by a no-reply abort from Sol. If the abort arrived late, the group was already gone. If one group aborted and the other did not, Sarah’s failure case still held: one high-density node emptied, simultaneity lost.

The alliance did not get to be polite at forty-three light-years.

“Write it as standing protocol. Dual-group independent clocks. Confirmation is informational. It is not permissive.”

“Written. Rerun?”

“Rerun.”

Iteration fifteen took the new protocol and the same delay. Both markers went dark on their own marks. The overlay did not wait for anyone to be ready. The proof survived the manners.

Kira’s shoulders dropped a fraction she did not give them permission for.

The board was a plan now. She ran sixteen and seventeen because stopping at the first repaired clean was how people died on the eighteenth.

Both held.

She saved the file.

The naming field sat empty. Chen would want a designation that could live in a citation and a casualty report. Kira wanted a word that told the people who would fly it what they were doing, not what they were taking.

She typed: Operation Reclamation: Final.

The cursor blinked. Final was the version she was willing to put in someone else’s hands. The people who would execute it were not ready. Not yet. Twelve junior officers were still learning the difference between a lab and a live envelope. David was still learning the chair in space. Thomas was still building the language the three species would need when the clocks disagreed.

They would be ready.

The board did not get to wait for the feeling.

CLIO dimmed the node a fraction, the way she dimmed it when the captain had been on the bridge too long and the ship had decided, provisionally, to mention it.

“Captain. You have been at this station for six hours and forty minutes. The reactor is in standby. All systems are nominal.”

“I know.”

“The file is saved.”

Kira kept her eyes on the name until the letters stopped being letters and became a door. Operation Reclamation: Final. Two battle spaces. No handshake. A pairing that would become someone else’s reality forty-three light-years from this chair.

She shut the display down.

The stations went dark. The viewport kept Earth and the yard and the two hulls. The plan was ready.

The people who would carry it were not. Not yet.

They would be.

If you enjoyed this story, you can follow the main story arc in The Exodus Rush, the first book in The Vethrak Requiem series.

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The Projection